Advani’s
personal stamp on Hindutva is the shift he engineered in its strategy
from cultural nationalism to religious jingoism. The political windfall
that Hindutva enjoys today, as he has every right to claim, is on
account of Ram Janmabhoomi movement that frenzied Hindu religious
sentiments. In its genesis and genius Hindutva was a project of cultural
nationalism. It had nothing to do with religion. Its early ideologues
and propagandists were, like Veer Savarkar, agnostics or atheists.
Neither Ram nor rituals nor temples mattered to them. Their role models
were Hitler and Mussolini. The ethos of European nationalism, rather
than the vision of the Vedas, or the spirit of Indian culture inspired
them.

The
irony inherent in cultural nationalism is that it signals and accelerates
cultural regression. Re-hashing a culture along an ideological bias implies
utter disrespect towards it. The Hindutva idea of Indian culture is an
arbitrary and a-historical construct. The uniqueness of Indian culture is its
composite and pluralistic nature. In no other part of the world has religious
and cultural plurality co-existed and cross-fertilized each other so
creatively. While Christians fought their denominational wars in the western
hemisphere, Indian Christianity remained free from confessional conflicts and
sectarian tensions. Shi’as and Sunnis in India do not kill each other as
their counterparts do in our neighborhood. Sikhism and Sufi mysticism witness
the synergy of Hinduism and Islam. These, and not the communal outbursts of
Hindutva, are the authentic signs of the vitality and creativity of Indian
culture.

How
integral this harmonious co-existence of plurality is to the spirit of India,
as Octavio Paz points out, is evident even from the way we serve and eat our
meals.In the west, the different
courses that comprise a meal follow one another. In our case, all items are
served on the same plate before we begin to eat, as though plurality is the
very food of our humanity. Togetherness is the essential character of our way
of life. It is this spirit of togetherness that welcomes and blends diverse
elements that seem disparate outside of that framework.This mytho-spiritual character of the Indian ethos has never failed to
mystify western observers. “Is India a mystery or a muddle?” was the
question that stalked E. M. Foster right through and beyond his tryst with
India. India is neither; she is, instead, a spiritual-cultural
unity-in-diversity that can host the different and the contrary. It was
because Gandhiji was authentically Indian that he could blend Indian
spirituality with western rationality and bamboozle the west. Swami
Vivekananda, who embodied the spirit of India, advocated a synthesis of the
east and the west: a possibility that did not present itself to western
thinkers then. The same spirit runs though Vivekananda’s concept of the
integrated Indian identity synthesizing Vedantic soul with Islamic body.This is, by and large, true of the Asiatic cultural and spiritual
ethos.

It
is this communitarian –as against communal- spirit of togetherness and
cooperative co-existence that also marks the so-called Semitic stock of
religions in their scriptural and spiritual core; for they are Asiatic faiths.
From its inception, the ideologues of Hindutva have, however, banked heavily
on caricaturing Judaism, Christianity and Islam as intolerant religions that
cannot coexist with others. But in India they do coexist; and happily too! It
is the west that degraded religion into a theatre of conflict.The great battle between Christianity and Islam, a thousand battles
within Christianity, were all fought either within Europe or on account of
Europe. Christianity, in particular, suffered gross distortions on account of
its domestication in the western culture. There is nothing in common between
the way of Jesus Christ and the spirit of western triumphalistic Christianity.
Western culture degraded Christianity spiritually and choked that faith with
earthly pomp and power.Hindutva
has walked Hinduism to the brink of this spiritual precipice; and only
spiritually enlightened Hindus can stand between this faith and its
degradation.

With
the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, Hindutva hitched its wagon to the twin horses of
culture and religion. The danger immanent in this needs to be recognized.
Culture is a domain of instability and decay. No culture has remained the same
for any length of time. Spirituality, on the other hand, is eternal and
unchanging. It was because Indian culture had a spiritual foundation that we
have been able to hold our own despite the upheavals in our history, including
a thousand years of domination by external forces. Once religion gets closely
identified with culture, it becomes vulnerable to the decay that necessarily
overtakes culture. The westernisation of Indian culture in the wake of
globalization is a clear warning on this. It is not an accident that the
protagonists of cultural nationalism are also purveyors of globalization that
throws open the floodgates of cultural neo-colonialism. The irony written into
Hindutva is that, even as it militates against individual conversions of
dalits and adivasis to Christianity or Islam, it is converting Hinduism into a
religion utterly contrary to its genius. Hindutva is closer to militant Islam
and triumphalistic Christianity than it is to Vedic spirituality. Except to
the willfully blind, it is a project of western materialistic culture driven
by the erstwhile European spirit of intolerance that paved the way for the
spiritual regression of that continent. In its outlook, thought patterns,
strategies, and even in styles of communication Hindutva is European, not
Indian.

Hindutva
has modeled itself on the decadent phenomena in European culture. Arnold
Toynbee in his “A Study of History” voiced his alarm at the signs of decay
that were becoming evident in European culture from the early decades of the
last century.Oswald Spengler in the “Decline of the West” laments over the
ossification or deadening of culture in Europe in the same period. Hitler and
Mussolini, and the penchant for conflict that convulsed Europe into two World
Wars, were all symptoms of this twilight phenomenon. It is Hitler, and not Ram
or Rahim, who comes to our mind when we see or hear Togadia and his comrades
speak.

Sane
Indian thinkers insisted all along that the glorification of conflict was a
sign of cultural regression. Tagore dreamt of an India that would not be
broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls and Gandhiji strove to
promote Hindu-Muslim unity risking his life. Until a few decades ago, even
thinkers sympathetic to the Hindutva cause were clear on this historical
truth. In his lectures on “integrated humanism” (April, 1965) Deen Dayal
Upadhyaya argued, “Unity in diversity and the expression of unity in various
forms have remained the central thought of Bharatiya culture”.
“Conflict,” he went on to add, “is not a sign of culture or nature:
rather it is a symptom of their degradation.”

It
is in this context that we need to see Hindutva’s mission to infuse the
heart of India with conflict and hate. Gujarat riots are, in that sense, not a
regional but a national tragedy to which those who cherish Indian culture and
spirituality cannot remain indifferent. Gujarat was turned into a laboratory
for the glorification of conflict. Trishul diksha that seeks to export this
regressive experiment to the rest of India is an assault on the culture of our
country and Hindu spirituality. How alien the spirit of Hindutva is to the
ethos of the Indian people is obvious from the fact that even after six
decades of relentless efforts this alien ideology of cultural nationalism did
not take roots in the minds of our people. Only when it was dressed up in the
costumes of religion, backed by massive propaganda blitz and communal
gimmicks, did it begin to seem acceptable to a section of the Hindu community.

Keeping
Indo-Pak relations at the boiling point has been the survival kit for Hindutva
as an ideology of conflict. In this its protagonists are hugely indebted to
their communal country cousins in Pakistan. If only Pakistan were to act
sensibly, that country would not aid and abet the Hindutva agenda. If the
current quest for a breakthrough in Indo-Pak relation does not succeed,
Pakistan may net an unwitting victory, not over our army but over the spirit
of India. It would enable Hindutva to over-run India, plunge the sub-continent
into bloodshed and poverty, and corrupt Hinduism and Indian culture beyond
repair. For that reason alone, if not for a thousand others, Vajpayee’s
initiative for disinfecting the subcontinent of conflict and violence needs to
succeed.But
only time will prove whether or not he has the stature and the freedom to
pursue this agenda that is contrary to the Sangh’s ideological bias. The PM
today faces the ultimate test of his stature as the poet-statesman. A break
through in Indo-Pak imbroglio has to be as much an exercise in creativity as
in statesmanship.